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Comment by gedrap | Hacker News Reader

Are you using some sort of leverage (haven't heard about leverages for btc though)? Looking at btc price movements, it seems that you need either 1) very high bankroll or 2) loads of transactions to make it work, as minute/hour price movements are rather low, and even lower for smaller time ranges. (maybe that's a lame question, I have no trading experience, just curious and reading a bit about it).

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There is leveraged trading, but using the leverage exposes you to directional risk, and in HFT you want to have as little directional risk as possible :)

On OKCoin, my flagship algo generates more than 4000 trades per day (and many more order placements). However, OKCoin is glitchy.

4000/day? I'm struggling to reach half of this :-) Can you share if your infrastructure is yours or are you using any sort of cloud setup? Can you share a bit about it?

Most of the exchanges (including OKCoin) are using cloud infrastructure. I place my instances in the same cloud and region (meaning, the same datacenter).

Nothing too fancy, I rent usual EC2 (or analogous on other cloud) "medium"-sized instances, with 4-8G RAM. All my code is written with Scala/Akka, so it is packed into a single JAR file.

(If you reach 2000 trades per day, even on OKCoin, it usually means that you are well into HFT territory, at it is generally impossible to stay profitable any other way. I might not know something about other options, though.)

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